Gil Hova wrote:I feel that there's a strong distinction between recreational and transformative games that will help us here. I think the two kinds of games work at cross purposes.

A transformative game is all about enlightening us on a certain topic and changing us in some way by playing it. A recreational game is all about flow and fiero. In other words, the purpose of a transformative game is to reflect the world; the purpose of a recreational game is to obliterate it.

And then also this:

I like to divide commercial recreational games into three categories: contests, puzzles, and worlds. It's very difficult to assign some significant external meaning to a contest and still have the contest be relevant. Contests can be only about themselves, so they have a very hard time reflecting the real world.

Since board games tend to be contests instead of puzzles or worlds, they have a very hard time carrying artistic meaning. Transformative designers therefore tend to work in genres with a lower barrier to entry, and in a game style that can more easily carry real-world meaning.

I’d like to respectfully disagree with Gil Hova. Though I like his typology and find it useful and illuminating, I don’t think it’s true that contests have a hard time carrying artistic meaning. I don’t find the distinction between recreational and transformative games as instructive – so many bridge the gap that I don’t know that the distinction really holds. The first that comes to mind is Twilight Struggle but the same is true about Dead of Winter, Tammany Hall and many many others. Almost any game with a theme really. Of course, much depends on how you understand “the purpose of a transformative game is to reflect the world” – and we can quibble about whether the purpose of Dead of Winter is to reflect the world or is it a by-product of what the game is doing, but in my opinion the only reason it places you in the extreme situation of a zombie apocalypse is that it’s a brilliant laboratory for revealing truths about human interactions in extreme conditions with a mixture of conflicting and joint interests. I use it in the classroom for exactly that reason. It might be true that the reason Isaac and Jon use it in Dead of Winter is because it’s fun for people and not because it ‘enlighten us on a certain topic and changes us in some way by playing it’ but enlightened we are, and also changed – whether we want it or not.

I’ve written it in greater length in response to the interview that Bruno Faidutti gave on this very find podcast – I think it’s a mistake to think that games (of the contest kind) are ‘too thin’ to carry an artistic meaning or that they are ‘just for fun’ and so we shouldn’t take it seriously even if they do. Any game with a theme has no choice but doing something to reflect the world. So unless you’re Red7 (I was expecting Mike to bring this one up in the safe, non-controversial games… though I’m sure someone will have an analysis of the power relations reflects in its abstract rainbow hierarchy), you will be saying something about the world. And I think designer should embrace it, not avoid it. And we should spend more time, as a community, thinking about the themes of our games.

I’m not going to say that every game has as deep a message as all others, and indeed it’s my point that many games have themes that weren’t really thought through (in other words, I think their artistic meaning is pretty poor), but even a tiny game like Love Letter sends a bunch of messages. Even my 7 year old niece had a bunch questions to ask about this game – why is the princess only receiving letters? Why can’t she send some of her own? Can she ask questions? Why can’t she just choose the one she wants? And so forth. This is clearly a case where the designer just took a stock cultural artifact off the shelf and applied it to the mechanics, and that’s totally fine. But in my opinion, you’re still responsible for the product that you produce even if you’ve used the tried and true cultural stories we all know and love. The point is: theme matters. Contests are not just about themselves when they have theme. And I much prefer the Batman Love Letter, not because I like Batman (I don't), but because the theme makes sense and fits the mechanics. I enjoy the game more that way.

A caveat before I continue – when I criticize games, that does not mean that I’m in favor of banning them. This is not about censorship, and neither is the case of Five Tribes. I’m glad that Days of Wonder changed their mind in response to the pressure for two reasons. First, it wasn’t just knee-jerk reaction of some people, but raised a serious discussion on the portrayal of slaves in this game. It wasn’t just an irrational reaction, but a bunch of people who didn’t have a problem with it at first were convinced that it’s gratuitous and inappropriate. Second, it really didn’t seem that slaves were in any way a conscious part of the artistic vision of the game. Cathala says about it in his designer diary is "Because in ancient times, we still need a little slave at home." The appeal to historical authenticity was echoed in comments that Days of Wonder people said later and is particularly ridiculous, as others have also noticed, in a game that features Djinns prominently. But even if this was a historical theme, or if you think fidelity to the myth of Arabian Nights was guiding Cathala, the choice to put slaves is indefensible (and elsewhere I explained why I think there’s a difference between the depiction of slaves and that of assassins, but this is getting too long). When you’re making a game, you pick and choose. I didn’t see that Cathala included the rape and execution of multiple virgin queens as part of his game – though it’s the most prominent feature, indeed the driving force, of the Arabian Nights framework. For some reason, it didn’t seem ‘fun’ to him to include the constant cycle of rape execution in his game. But the Djinns are fun. The spices are fun. The carpets are sweet. And the slaves. Cathala is a brilliant designer that I really admire but I really think this was not a careful choice, but rather an attitude that we shouldn’t take this so seriously (as articulated by Faidutti in his interview). If this was an integral part of the artistic vision of the game, I doubt they would have changed it. And if he stuck to his plan with some serious explanation I wouldn’t fault him for it (though I would be disappointed). I haven’t played it yet, but from what I gather it seems that Tomorrow is an example of a game where the controversial elements were integral to the artistic vision. There would always be people doing all sorts of games and themes that are offensive or crazy, and that’s totally fine. But we need to have a conversation about the norms of our hobby – what is accepted as a mainstream, what we consume without thinking because it’s fine.

Which leads me to my second point is that I think we can learn a lot about our culture from what is and what isn’t controversial. The fact that colonialism and ‘discovery’ of the new world (whether historical or hypothetical) is, I think, revealing. The fact that I can easily think of ten great games that have no women in them or only a handful in very stereotypical depictions is a problem. These are example of what Hova calls ‘invisible ropes’, which are everywhere in our hobby. Things might be shifting on this, but the tides of cultural change are typically very slow.

To make my point even sharper and perhaps more controversial (so meta) – I want to discuss another game that is seemingly unassuming and inoffensive as can be. And for the most part, I think it is. But I think it does hide some interesting elements. The game is Harbour– a small box game from Tasty Minstrel and Scott Almes that attempts to distill and streamline a resource management game like Le Havre by making a worker placement game with just one worker. It’s a cute little game that I got on Kickstarter, in part because of the really amazing art that the game comes with.

The theme of the game is pasted on in the same way that the theme of Abyssis pasted on – both games are classic Euro games that basically try to mimic and idealized image of medieval Europe. In Abyss they said something like ‘what if make this under the water? That would be awesome!’ but nothing in the game really changed because of that, you just use squids and weird creatures to do exactly what you would if you were gathering peasants and artisans to attract lords and buy mansions. But the art is amazing. In any case, Harbour has the same deal: we take a Euro games mechanics of trading in a harbor and paste a fantasy theme on it to make it interesting. The fact these are Orcs and Goblins, Wizards and Dwarves means absolutely nothing – the game would just play just as plausibly with regular people carrying out their everyday business. They even have a beholder, one of D&D’s most terrifying monsters, as a librarian (which raises the question – how are you not turned into stone when you check out a book?).

So what’s going on here? In placing D&D monsters and fantasy creatures in the mundane setting of a harbor, the designer and publisher were probably just trying to have a bit of fun by placing these creatures where we wouldn’t expect them, at the same time making their dry ‘trading in the Mediterranean’ theme spiced up with some fancy art. Why can’t an Orc be a cartographer? They ask, and of course we can see that an Orc can be cartographer because there he is, hunched over the desk. Orcs are imaginary creature and we can imagine them to be whatever we want them to be. And maybe some beholders are kind? Why must they all be evil?

But you see we have created Orcs and Goblins as imaginary monsters as a representation some things that we have found in the world. In various sources Orcs and Trolls are depicted as ‘dumb’ and ‘savage’ people – down to the accent that was considered barbaric by the people writing it. Orcs and Trolls represented actual people in the world we were afraid of – bad people, often from a different race or that speak a different language. In our imaginary worlds we give ourselves permission to paint little horns on their heads in our anger and hatred (because it helps deal with it!) but the stories we tell, our children and each other, about the Trolls that will snatch young kids from a villages and towns are not unrelated to the history of relationships between different peoples.In transposing the Orcs and Trolls into an ordinary, mundane human world – the game unwittingly is telling us ‘there are not monsters in this world. Even those you think are pure evil are creatures with emotions, that really just wanted to develop their artistic skills but ended up as menial laborers because they had no choice’. And if that’s not controversial, than I don’t know what is.

Since I wrote my post about the morality of war games, and game themes more generally, I got lots of interesting responses with people’s perspectives about why the like certain games with problematic themes or other games they won’t play. I also came across a number of very interesting pieces on the topic, the most interesting of which by far was this one about a book by Peter Gray on the way playing games helps the development of kids. Drawing on lessons from kids playing in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, Gray says this about violent games with controversial themes:

Some people fear that violent play creates violent adults, but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence… It is wrong to think that somehow we can reform the world for the future by controlling children's play and controlling what they learn. If we want to reform the world, we have to reform the world; children will follow suit.

This seems a little overstated, as I can imagine violent play getting out of hand and starting to shape reality. But there’s certainly truth in it and it’s hard to argue with it in the context. There were other interesting pieces, such as this piece which offers some serious criticisms of the popular game Cards Against Humanity or this one trying to give advice to prospective designers who are considering controversial themes for their games. But the most interesting one was an interview with famed designer Bruno Faidutti on the most excellent podcast Ludology. They decided to interview him following his article “Post-colonial Catan” which I cited in my post. I enjoyed the article and I’m a big fan of Faidutti’s designs in general. Which is why I was disappointed to disagree with most of what he said in the interview. I started writing a comment about it in the forums but it became so long that I decided to make it into a blog post. I'll start with what I agree with - near the end of the episode Faidutti says he wants to see greater diversity of designers - more women, more black people, more young people and in general more variety. I couldn't agree more. This is a general issue that has special importance when it comes to artistic and cultural creation. I also agree that it's a good idea for designers to have a more conscious vision of their themes and reflect about the social message of their games. Given this agreement, I don't quite understand why Faidutti says that he doesn’t wants designers to do anything differently, but he is spot on in saying that there is a paucity of analysis and reflection on board games and that board games don't get the attention they deserve compared to other art/cultural forms. When I started my blog, that was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind - to do political analysis of games that takes them a bit more seriously than they are taken in mainstream media. I wanted to do it from the perspective of a gamer who loves games so that they would be treated with the love and seriousness that we usually treat them when we talk about the endlessly on BGG forums, but also thinks about what they mean as meaningful cultural creations. I haven't done much on this front thus far and I'm not sure I'm the right person to do that, but hey – at least I’m trying.

Which is why I was disappointed that Faidutti decided to start the interview by repeatedly saying people shouldn't take his piece so seriously, that it started as a joke and even though he thinks it raises interesting issues, we shouldn't take them very seriously. I always find that kind of response surprising, as he obviously spent a lot of time and effort writing the piece, but it seems to me that he was mostly trying to calm things down, having received angry responses of people who thought his post aims to censor their board games, or that the such posts would lead us to a boring world of politically correct gaming where all the fun has been squeezed out of everything.

Faidutti is right to think these reactions are misguided, but it's not because his analysis shouldn't be taken seriously or because it means that we shouldn't do anything differently. They are misguided because we can have serious discussions and even disagreements about serious things without losing our senses. Or, at least, so I hope. More to the point, in this specific case the anger is completely misguided - as I wrote at greater length earlier, criticizing something doesn't mean we want to censor it. The point of discussions of this sort is to persuade - and make changes to the norms we already have. You can always go against the norm though obviously that’s not easy. When I discuss these things, my goal is to convince people (or be convinced - there are often things I haven't thought about), and if I'm successful the change will come not because there will be censorship of games, but because people's attitudes will change. For example, in his comment about this podcast Isaach Shalev mentions the way the characters in Coup and The Resistance are racially diverse, and there is equal representation of women in a way that is not demeaning. That is, sadly, not the standard in our hobby. I say sadly because I am saddened by it. I'm perfectly aware that there are people who don't care, and I think it's totally their prerogative. I hope to convince them to care because right now the state of affairs is that there are many great games that I really love, like Mage Wars, that has art on them that I find problematic. Mage Wars is a game I really really love – it’s one of my favorites. And it's not half as bad as a bunch of other games but still, that's a turn off for me - I hate seeing female characters sexualized for no apparent reason, going into battle with unwearable armor which emphasizes their body. Not because I mind nudity - I am very liberal in the art that I consume - but because it bothers me that the same game has the men wearing combat gear while the women wearing shiny metal bras or almost nothing. It's also troubling because of the way it relates to the history and context of troubling depictions of women. And I guess I could say, that on some level, it offends me a little (and I’m not the only one). To me, it's just bad taste - I feel like we could, and should, do better than enhance these stereotypes and when I see game that's so innovative, so smart, so full of love - a gigantic amount of time and attention was invested in it - and it couldn't be saved from these dated tropes - I cringe. In the same vein, I'm disappointed, like Niki from Board With Life, when a fabulous game like Sheriff of Nottingham has only playable female character (out of five) - even if I still would consider this game one of the best games of the year. As it happens, I often have to choose between a game that I love and art/presentation that I dislike. And I accept that that's my problem. It's not half as bad as it in other parts of our culture (as in video games), and it usually won't stop me from getting the game. Yet I think it’s a problem, mainly because of the way it makes gaming less hospitable for women and girls who would otherwise want to be a part of our hobby. It’s an issue we should not just be aware of, as Faidutti says, but also do something about. And we can - if enough people were bothered by it, the market dimensions would change. Naked sexualized warrior-women (or very few, if at all, playable women) would no longer be the default in gaming (I think we can see this change taking place, though very slowly). Of course, they would still be out there for those who really want them - so no censorship involved - but the default would be to challenge ourselves and break new grounds on this front. The same goes to all those issue that Faidutti mentions - from racial diversity to perspectives about colonialism and other forms of exoticism. True, it would be great if there was more variety in the realm of designers. But bald white men, such as Faidutti and myself, can still challenge ourselves to think out of the box and do better on this (on our own standards - so no imposed standards of censorship). The second point of disagreement is about board games as vehicles for meaningful content. Faidutti insists in a variety of points that board games can really only have very simplistic content because they are more like pictures than novels and you only have very few elements. With so few elements, he says, you can’t delve very deeply into anything. This is what Faidutti calls the 'technical' reason why there are simplistic themes in board games (as opposed to the ideological reason that is related to the aforementioned fact that most game designers are old white men). The technical reason seems completely false to me so I wanted to say something about it. Faidutti says that "board games are simple, short rules, always a bit abstract" (16:56). Because we are abstracting from specifics and only have a few rules, we can’t say much and what's more important - we can't say anything serious. I think that's obviously false. Some of the most evocative and expressive art forms involve very few elements. Poetry is one of the most obvious examples but there is a variety of other examples, including Hemingway's short short story. But it's also obviously false about games. We just mentioned Coup, a game whose original graphic design seems completely in line with boring traditional gender roles (only one female character with a passive ability) got reskinned as superbly interesting and diverse game which Shalev now rightly notes to be social commentary. In the new version of the game they realized that maybe the Duke has to stay male (though I think that's a frontier we can also smash one day), the assassin and captain don't have to, and neither does the Inquisitor - and I think that's fabulous. Likewise, Love Letter is a tiny game that has only 15 cards but as its gazillion implantations show, it offers a great variety of options. And they feel different, because getting a love letter to the princess feels differently than getting the Munchkin loot. And you won't be surprised to find out that the Batman version is not about courting Batman, though, of course, it should be.

The Inquisitor in the latest expansion to Coup. Awesomeness

Moreover, I think the claim that games are pretty abstract and not accompanied with as much story and lore as novels is pretty false. This might be a matter of style and of course there are games, like Settlers of Catan, that say very little about their own world. But so many game designers spend so much of their time on the lore, and so many games are accompanied with long pieces of fiction, whether in the rulebook (as in City of Remnants or Twilight Struggle), on the company's website (as in Summoner Wars or Terra Mystica) or as actual books that come out following the game (as in Sentinels of the Multiverse). In many of these games, there’s lots of story on the cards and you discover it through playing the game (as in Dead of Winter or Twilight Struggle). That's not every game, and I'm aware of the fact I just mentioned three games by Plaid Hat Games, who specialize in thematic games. One may say that Euro games tend to be more abstract and less specific (partially because they tend to be language independent and therefore avoid flavor text on components) and that might be true. But there is really a large swathe of games that do a lot more than the bear bone abstract theme that Faidutti talks about (which, as I said, is not free of content even if it's minimal). The recent (and fabulous) Dogs of War from Paolo Mori is an example of that - a brilliant worker placement game that's very Euro-ish in style yet more than half of its rulebook is a very elaborate fictional account of the world the game is set in. I really like Dogs of War - it's a unique and interesting hybrid - but I personally think the fiction in the rulebook is not very good. The game is still mechanically brilliant and very enjoyable, but I think that if it had better fiction with less hackneyed clichés and more character development - the game would have been much more interesting (also, Niki from Board With Life reminds us that this is another excellent game she loves that only has one playable female character). I think that good games make good stories; very few of us play just the mechanics without caring about the theme. Last point on this is that even when the theme is historical or founded in an existing fiction (such as Lord of the Rings) and the game theme is very abstract and minimalist (like many Euros), the designer still makes choices about what of the content to include. Who are the playable sides in this war? What kind of feel do we want to give to this historic setting? The argument that abstract games with thin themes don't have much say is really weak, in my opinion. The third disagreement is related to the previous one and it's about the kinds of themes we want for board games. Faidutti says that games need to be fun and therefore they have to be light-hearted. In board games, we look for light settings that would make people smile. You can't have a setting that's too involved - as you would in a movie or a book - or that would spoil gaming night. Board games are not meant to make political points and when they try to do that - they are not fun. I agree that the main point of board games is not to make political statements. In fact, if you want to make a political statement, I don't think designing a board game is a great way to go about it. But that it's not the main point doesn't mean board games don't carry with them any political content. They inevitably do, as any work of art. If board games were only bare and abstract mechanics, they wouldn't be very much fun for most of us. True, the theme helps us understand and internalize the mechanics - but that can’t not the only reason we have themes for board games. And it's not the case that we want light themes for game night if we are to have fun. I actually think the opposite is true for most games - we want things that matter and raise the stakes, or we would feel like we're playing kids games. That's one of the reasons, I think, we play war games - we want to feel like the stakes are really high. In other cases we want to lower the stakes and not take what we're doing too seriously, which is why the second edition of Cash and Guns make the art more cartoonish. I think they made the right choice - when we're pointing foam guns at each other, some may feel like realistic art might be too much. Different people will have different threshold, but it's just not true that most of our games are in light-hearted settings that make us smile. Does the Cathulu world make you smile? Does the Star World universe? It's also not true that we can't have fun when the theme is serious or one that invites thinking deeply. At some point Faidutti compares board games to light novels, which is true for some games. But many many more of them really aren't. They are much more like a sprawling fantasy novel, a historic drama or an economic report about the development of the car industry. We have lots of fun doing serious things - we read long and dense novels for fun. Why else would we read them? We read non-fiction for fun, and argue about politics on the internet for fun. There is a great variety of things we do for fun and these are such different ‘funs’ that perhaps we shouldn’t use the same word. But we do. If you think about it, fun and serious are really not mutually exclusive. So I don't think it's enough that we are aware of the exoticism, and are making fun of them. I think Faidutti is right to be concerned about the colonists in Puerto Rico, where we white-wash these of our history (and we do so not only, and not primarily, in games). I think being aware and making fun of it, as he suggests, is definitely one way to deal with these simplifications, but it's not the only one and perhaps not even the best one (and, contra Faidutti, it certainly doesn't seem to be the case in Five Tribes where there is no trace of self-humor or even self-awareness). We can do better, as designers and gamers, if push ourselves to think a little more broadly about the themes in the games we make and play. And we can do better, as consumers, if we voice our displeasure with hackneyed stereotypes and opt for games that have unusual themes or depictions. There's only so much courage we can expect from commercial companies if we, as board gamers, don't send the message that we want gaming themes to be broader, more appealing to a wide audience, more diverse and more deeply interesting. That's my take on the matter. I don't support censorship of board games, but I think we are, for the most part, stuck in a limited world of hackneyed clichés. We can do better than that. Every year amazing games come out with innovative and brilliant mechanics that break new ground. And we see a greater variety of themes and stories. Yet we can do a lot better than Settlers of Catan on that front. Not every game needs to be a breakthrough on all fronts and I'm not saying that I won't play another game that pits orcs against humans or has me kill zombies. But in my book one of the parameters of a good games that it says something interesting. And other games? It's not that they have no message, it's just that the message they have is not very original. And that's a shame.

Game designers often think, rightly, that when they design a board game, theme and mechanics should match. Some designers start with an idea for a mechanic, and then find a theme that works well with it; others have a passion for a theme they want to have covered in gaming; there are few who start from inspiring components but it seems like many (most?) start with an idea of the mechanics they want and a vague theme that they are attracted to, often inspired by another game that they love. For all these folks, matching theme with mechanics helps make the game more compelling and exciting. While it's true that a good mechanic can usually survive retheming (or even carry a game with little or no theme), theme helps make mechanics comprehensible, intuitive and easy to learn. What Eric Zimmerman, designer of Quantum, says about cards is true in general: "[a] card title and image serve as a kind of cognitive 'gateway' into understanding the card function. They help orient the player, making the rules component of the card easier to digest (and remember)." A tight match of theme and mechanics simplifies a complicated game, makes it easier to learn and retain the rules and helps keeping the game going smoothly. If you think about the adding of cards to your character as 'equipping' them, your mind will automatically makes assumptions that help the game: you can use it while others can't, you can't have too many things equipped at the same time, you can hand it over to someone who is nearby and so forth. At the same time, a game that violates thematic assumptions ("what? I can equip this but never drop it? How does that make sense?!") can be confusing, disorienting and very frustrating. Lastly, even most hardcore mechanic oriented players like a theme a little bit - it fills in the blanks of their superior wits in XXX, and gives a bit of meaning to what they did when they destroyed you just there.For thematic oriented players and designers, who typically care more about the narrative of the game, there is sometimes a tendency to add more and more mechanics to accommodate the needs of the story. A game like Descent, that focuses on story and character development, ends up adding more and more rules as the game progresses. Each scenario has some special rules that are added in order to capture the situation of that specific mission - its goal, its circumstances and the twists and turns of the plot. Every piece of equipment and even every monster is a little rulebook which changes the game a bit to give you the feeling that your character is progressing on its narrative arc in the world of the game. This is a very challenging design work, because there's still a need to keep the mechanics balanced within the great variety of options. The strength of thematic games is that they let people experience the story more closely - and it's no coincidence that they are somewhat similar to role-playing games, as they aim for the same kind of experience. But they are weaker if their mechanics don't present a great challenge, are are ever-changing or just don't make any sense. A good thematic game has decisions that make sense even if you strip them down to their mechanical bare bones. A good example of that is Dead of Winter, where each crossroads card has a story that presents you with a thematic decision like 'should we accept more survivors to the colony'. At the same time, it presents you with a great strategic decision that can be considered mechanically - do I pay the costs of one extra food token per round in exchange for an extra action die, another pawn to move around and a random special ability from the deck?So much about matching theme and mechanic, on which much has been said. I raise this old issue again not to give another answer to the question 'how should we balance the requirements of theme and mechanics in a game' but rather to discuss how the choices made in the balancing of theme and mechanics impact the politics of a game, or as I like to call it - the little social world created by the game. My previous post on political analysis, which explains that it focuses on the way players relate to each other within the game, might suggest that it is mainly concerned with mechanics. When I asked 'what can players do to each other in this game' I mostly gave examples of mechanics - they can take resources from each other or they can't, they get assigned special roles by the game or they don't. Does it matter what thematic explanation is given to describe the fact that you take a cube from somebody else's reserves?I think it does, and an example might serve to explain. In Village, your meeples die as time passes. Presumably, they die of old age after a long and satisfying life as a carriage maker, traveler or monk. Mechanically speaking, time is a resource you can spend (and usually, though not always, avoid spending) to gain some other resources. The cost of spending time is that occasionally, specifically every 10 units you spend, you have to give up one of your pawns (aka meeples/workers/etc.), in a certain order. Technically, that's not very different than trading sheep for wood, but in Village the game goes to great length to persuade you that the meeple really did die in peace, literally laying them to rest in the Village's chronicle or the graves behind the church.

R.I.P, dear little meeple

A different approach is taken by the designer of Arctic Scavengers, though he presents you with basically the same choice: give up one of your guys for some resource. Yet in this case, the image that the game presents you as the pretext of this trading action is very grim. Indeed, not quite sheep for wood in this case, more like sheep for... I'm not gonna go there.

In any case, I think it seems to me that putting your meeple to sleep on the pretty board in front of you feels very different from trashing a card, returning it to the box, while the evil cannibal is literally gazing at you from the table, holding his hands above a bloody plate. And this difference makes sense - Village is a game about the euphemized and imagined peaceful life of medieval Europe, which some have compared to a nice cup of tea for good reason. That meeples can die in this game is pretty surprising, as it belongs to a genre of games that avoids conflict and really doesn't want to make you feel bad in your stomach as you play. That they can pull it off and still appeal to the Euro crowd is an impressive achievement, especially since it is sometimes in your favor to have your meeples die sooner rather than later and the game incentives you to control this process. This thematic incongruence which is successfully integrated into the game is what most reivewers cite as its main innovation. In contrast, Arctic Scavengers does not want to make you feel nice. The game description starts with the death of the 90% of the world's population and then adds, if you missed the point that the "The world of Arctic Scavengers is cold and brutal" (emphasis, I kid you not, is in the original). no wonder some people said it was going to make you feel scared, and they said it while pretending that people are shooting at them. Go figure.

Please stop looking at me... It's freaking me out!

Consider again the crossroads card from Dead of Winter. The beauty of them is that they present choices that make sense from a thematic as well as mechanic point of view, and those match. But players' intuitions might pull them in different directions: the same choice, presented in mechanic terms, might lead people to choose differently than if thought about it in thematic terms. And Dead of Winter forces players to have that discussion, which is brilliant. Someone may say 'we cannot afford to have more mouths to feed, our colony is food' which is, essentially a strategic (mechanical) consideration, while another may respond thematically by saying 'we cannot leave these people to die out there in the cold'. Of course, both people could be thinking about both implications - or they could be thinking just about the mechanics, while using thematic explanations as excuses. But I have seen many people make decisions on the basis of thematic considerations, out of concern for the aesthetic or moral position of their character/s. The sacred and eternal battle between the min/maxers and the role-players, the author said, is the oldest and most intense feud in the history of tabletop, and indeed it will rage until the end of days. And in any case, Dead of Winter makes you feel guilty when you turn away helpless survivors because you know in your heart of hearts that it's wrong, but you think it's the right decision given the game situation.

Difficult thematic and strategic decisions

To sum, the theme of a game is very important for political analysis. Not because you can only analyze political games that have an explicitly politically theme, like 1960: The Making of the President, but because there's a lot to learn about a game from exploring the story it tries to tell, and the way it ties it to the mechanics. Sometimes a game tries to tell you that it's not very serious about its thematic commitment - as when a character 'dies' but comes back right away. This is a mechanic hint that the explicit theme is not to be taken too seriously. Analyzing the game politically requires looking at the intersection between theme and mechanics to see what the game purports to say and what it actually says, and how the relationship between these two things affects the way players, which are real people, treat each other around the table as well as on it. It starts with the basic setup of the game - are players fighting each other? Competing? Working together? And it continues to the actual actions people take and the ways they affect other players. What does the game call it when I take one of your resources?

How one understands a theme is open for interpretations and will vary from person to person. Of course, this doesn't mean that it's meaningless to have a discussion about it or point to some aspects that are not completely subjective. This is, of course, dangerous waters, but it's part of the mission of the political gamer.